Reading List

Authors Like Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel was fifteen when he was deported from Sighet, in northern Transylvania, to Auschwitz in May 1944. His mother and his younger sister Tzipora were murdered on arrival; he and his father were marched to Buchenwald, where his father died in January 1945, less than three months before the camp was liberated. Ten years later Wiesel finished an 862-page manuscript in Yiddish. Cut to 245 pages, it was published in Buenos Aires in 1956 as Un di velt hot geshvign — “And the World Remained Silent” — and cut again to become La Nuit (1958), with a preface by François Mauriac. The English Night of 1960 sold so slowly that its first print run of 3,000 took three years to go; it has since sold millions, and became an Oprah's Book Club pick in a new translation by his wife Marion in 2006. Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and died in New York in 2016. Readers come to Night for its compression — a whole destroyed world in little more than a hundred pages — for a son and his father, and for a faith that does not survive the first night in the camp. The writers below share his subject or his task: to tell what happened in a way that cannot be turned into comfort.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Holocaust testimony · Memoir and the novel of witness · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Elie Wiesel, read Primo Levi's If This Is a Man next — the other essential Auschwitz memoir, written with a chemist's exactness. Imre Kertész was a Hungarian boy of fourteen who went through Auschwitz and Buchenwald too, and turned it into a novel. Charlotte Delbo is the great woman's account of the camps, and Viktor Frankl asks what Wiesel refuses to answer: whether meaning survives there at all. And for the children and the generation after, Art Spiegelman.

10 authors like Elie Wiesel

01
The other essential testimony · Closest match

Primo Levi

Italian · b. 1919 · Memoirist and chemist · Premio Strega 1979

Levi was a young chemist from Turin, arrested with a partisan group and deported from the Fossoli camp to Auschwitz in February 1944. If This Is a Man was first published by a small house, De Silva, in 1947 in a run of 2,000 copies, and only found its readers after Einaudi reissued it in 1958. The Truce (1963) describes his long journey home; The Drowned and the Saved (1986) is his last reckoning with the camp. The Wrench won the Premio Strega in 1979.

The book to read straight after Night, and its opposite in temperament. Wiesel writes the camp as a collapse of faith, in short, burning scenes; Levi writes it as a system to be observed and understood, in calm and exact prose. Together they are the two foundations of the literature of Auschwitz, and The Drowned and the Saved takes on the questions of guilt and survival that Night leaves open.

— Lisanne

Every book by Primo Levi →

02
A boy in the same camps

Imre Kertész

Hungarian · b. 1929 · Novelist · Nobel 2002

Kertész was deported from Budapest at fourteen, to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald, and returned to Budapest in 1945. Fatelessness (1975) is a novel that follows a teenage boy through the same journey, told in a flat, almost obedient voice that refuses to be horrified. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”.

The closest experience to Wiesel's of anyone on this list — a Hungarian Jewish teenager, Auschwitz, Buchenwald — written in the opposite way. Where Night cries out, Fatelessness keeps describing, and the effect is just as devastating. Read it to see how the same months can become a novel rather than a deposition.

— Lisanne
Every book by Imre Kertész →
03
The women's convoy

Charlotte Delbo

French · b. 1913 · Memoirist and playwright

Delbo and her husband Georges Dudach printed anti-Nazi material in occupied Paris and were arrested in March 1942; he was shot that May. In January 1943 she was deported to Auschwitz with 229 other French women, most of them political prisoners, in the convoy known as the 31000; 49 came back. Her trilogy Auschwitz and After — None of Us Will Return, Useless Knowledge and The Measure of Our Days — appeared in French between 1965 and 1971.

The great account of the camps by a woman, and the formal companion to Night: short sections, prose broken into poetry, a scene and then silence. Delbo is less interested in God than Wiesel and more in the body — thirst, cold, the roll call — and in the women who kept one another alive. The third volume, on life after return, is where she goes further than almost anyone.

— Lisanne
Every book by Charlotte Delbo →
04
The opposite conclusion

Viktor Frankl

Austrian · b. 1905 · Psychiatrist

Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, then to Auschwitz and to Kaufering and Türkheim, subcamps of Dachau, where he was liberated in April 1945. His wife, mother and father were murdered. He dictated the first part of Man's Search for Meaning in nine days after his return; it has sold well over nine million copies.

Read Frankl next to Night for the argument between them. Both survived the same camps; Frankl concluded that the one freedom left to a prisoner is the attitude he takes, and built a therapy on it. Wiesel's book refuses that kind of lesson. Neither cancels the other, but readers who finished Night wanting something to hold on to usually find it here.

— Lisanne

Every book by Viktor Frankl →

05
The before and the after

Aharon Appelfeld

Israeli · b. 1932 · Novelist

Appelfeld was born in Czernowitz, in Bukovina. His mother was killed, he and his father were sent to a camp in Transnistria, and at about eleven he escaped and survived alone, passing as a Gentile in the Ukrainian countryside. He reached Palestine after the war, learned Hebrew and wrote all his books in it. Badenheim 1939 is set in a spa town where Jewish holidaymakers refuse to see what is coming; The Story of a Life is his memoir. He won the Israel Prize in 1983.

Wiesel writes the night itself; Appelfeld almost never does. His novels stop on the eve of deportation or begin after it, and the catastrophe sits in the gap. Badenheim 1939 reads like the world of Night's first chapter — the Sighet that would not listen to Moishe the Beadle — turned into a quiet, terrible fable.

— Lisanne
06
The son's story

Art Spiegelman

American · b. 1948 · Cartoonist · Pulitzer 1992

Spiegelman was born in Stockholm in 1948 to Polish Jewish parents, Vladek and Anja, who had both survived Auschwitz. Maus, serialised in his magazine Raw from 1980, tells his father's story, with Jews drawn as mice and Germans as cats, alongside his own difficult relationship with the man telling it. It was collected in two volumes in 1986 and 1991 and received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Night is a son watching his father die; Maus is a son trying to get his father's story out of him decades later. It is the book to give anyone who has read Wiesel at school and wants to understand what the camps did to the next generation, and it is as unsentimental about survivors as Wiesel is about himself.

— Lisanne
07
Written before the ending

Anne Frank

German-Dutch · b. 1929 · Diarist

Anne Frank was given a diary for her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942 and kept it through the two years her family spent hiding in an Amsterdam annexe, until they were discovered on 4 August 1944. In the spring of 1944 she began revising it for publication after the war. She died in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945; her father Otto, the family's only survivor, published it as Het Achterhuis on 25 June 1947.

The pairing every school makes, and for good reason: Night is written by a survivor looking back, the diary by a girl who does not know how it ends. Wiesel and Frank were born a year apart. Reading them together is the clearest way to feel the distance between hoping inside a catastrophe and testifying after it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anne Frank →

08
How it was done

Hannah Arendt

German-American · b. 1906 · Political philosopher

Arendt was a German Jewish philosopher who fled Germany after a brief arrest by the Gestapo, escaped an internment camp in southern France and reached the United States in 1941. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was her first book in English. She covered the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, and the resulting book, with its phrase “the banality of evil” and its criticism of the wartime Jewish councils, caused a lasting controversy and estranged her from many Jewish readers.

The view from outside the camp. Wiesel tells you what happened to one family; Arendt asks how a modern state organised it and what kind of man ran the timetables. Read Eichmann in Jerusalem knowing it is argued and contested — that is part of its value next to a book like Night.

— Lisanne

Every book by Hannah Arendt →

09
Survival, a lifetime later

Edith Eger

Hungarian-American · b. 1927 · Psychologist

Eger grew up in Košice and was deported to Auschwitz at sixteen in May 1944; her parents were sent to the gas chambers on arrival, and she was forced to dance for Josef Mengele. She and her sister Magda were liberated by American soldiers at Gunskirchen in 1945. She became a clinical psychologist in California, and published her memoir, The Choice, in 2017. She died in 2026, aged 98.

The same deportation as Wiesel's — Hungarian Jews, spring 1944, families split on the ramp — seen from seventy years further on. Eger writes as a therapist who has spent a career with trauma, including her own, and her book is about what came after: the decades of silence, and the slow return. It answers a question Night deliberately does not ask.

— Lisanne
10
Memory, a generation on

W. G. Sebald

German · b. 1944 · Novelist · National Book Critics Circle Award 2001

Sebald was born in Bavaria in 1944 and spent most of his working life teaching in England. His books mix fiction, travel, memory and grainy photographs. Austerlitz, published months before he died in December 2001, follows a man brought to Britain on a Kindertransport in 1939 who slowly recovers the story of his parents; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

For readers who want to know how the silence Wiesel wrote against looks a generation later. Sebald never describes the camps directly; his characters circle a loss they cannot name. Next to Night he shows the other half of testimony — what it costs to remember, and what it costs not to.

— Lisanne

Every book by W. G. Sebald →

Where to start if you loved Elie Wiesel

If you want the next essential testimony, read Primo Levi.

If This Is a Man, and later The Drowned and the Saved.

If you want the same journey as a novel, read Imre Kertész.

Fatelessness: a Hungarian boy, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, told without a single cry.

If you want something to hold on to afterwards, read Viktor Frankl.

Man's Search for Meaning — the argument Night refuses to make.

If you want the generation after, read Art Spiegelman.

Maus: a son, a father, and the story between them.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Elie Wiesel

Who should I read if I love Elie Wiesel?

Primo Levi first: If This Is a Man is the other essential memoir of Auschwitz. Imre Kertész went through Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a Hungarian teenager and wrote it as the novel Fatelessness. Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After is the great account by a woman, and Aharon Appelfeld's novels circle the same catastrophe from before and after. Viktor Frankl, Art Spiegelman, Anne Frank, Hannah Arendt, Edith Eger and W. G. Sebald complete the list.

What books are like Night?

Primo Levi's If This Is a Man (1947) and Imre Kertész's Fatelessness (1975) are the closest: both follow a young Jewish prisoner through Auschwitz. Charlotte Delbo's None of Us Will Return has the same short, fractured form. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning (1946) covers the same camps with a very different conclusion, and Art Spiegelman's Maus tells a father's survival through his son's eyes.

Is Night a memoir or a novel?

Wiesel called it his testimony and it is published as a memoir. It began as a much longer Yiddish account, published in Buenos Aires in 1956, which he cut sharply for the French edition of 1958. Some scholars, including Naomi Seidman and Ruth Franklin, have argued that the shorter text is shaped with a novelist's techniques and that the French version softens the anger of the Yiddish one; the events it describes are not in question.

Is Primo Levi similar to Elie Wiesel?

They wrote the two foundational memoirs of Auschwitz, but in opposite ways. Wiesel's Night is short and anguished, centred on his father and his loss of faith. Levi's If This Is a Man is calm and exact, the work of a chemist describing a system. Most readers who love one need the other.

Is Anne Frank's diary similar to Night?

They are often taught together, and the writers were born a year apart, but they are different kinds of book. Anne Frank wrote her diary in hiding in Amsterdam between 1942 and 1944, without knowing how it would end; she died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Wiesel wrote Night about ten years after surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, looking back.

What did Elie Wiesel write after Night?

Night was followed by two short novels, Dawn (1961) and Day, which form a trilogy with it. He went on to write more than forty books, including the novels The Gates of the Forest (1964) and A Beggar in Jerusalem, which won the Prix Médicis in 1968, the play The Trial of God (1979), and the memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea (1994).

Footnotes

  1. Night (memoir) — Wikipedia
  2. Elie Wiesel — Wikipedia
  3. Imre Kertész — Nobel Prize in Literature 2002
  4. Charlotte Delbo — Wikipedia
  5. Art Spiegelman — Wikipedia
  6. The Diary of a Young Girl — Wikipedia
  7. National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2001
  8. Edith Eva Eger, writer, psychologist and Holocaust survivor, dies — Telex

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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